Meet MEF’s Founders
James W. Borton
James Borton, is an independent environmental policy writer and former (Hong Kong-based) foreign correspondent for The Washington Times. He contributes regularly to Asia Sentinel, Asia Times, East Asia Forum, Geopolitical Monitor, Nikkei Asian Review, The South China Morning Post, Project Syndicate and World Politics Review. He has edited four books, The South China Sea: Challenges and Promises, Islands and Rocks in the South China Sea: Post Hague Ruling, The Art of Medicine in Metaphors and Venture Japan.
He was a past National Endowment Humanities Fellow at Yale University. He has a B.A. and a M.A. with honors in American Studies from the University of Maryland. He has been a non-resident fellow at the Stimson Center, the US-Asia Institute and Tufts University Science Diplomacy Center and has participated in numerous South China Sea conferences. Also, he co-founded the Mekong Environment Forum in Can Tho, Vietnam. He has just completed his latest book, Dispatches from the South China Sea: Navigating to Common Ground. He’s an avid sailor and waterman in South Carolina.
Nguyen Minh Quang
Nguyen Minh Quang, PhD, is a senior lecturer at Can Tho University in Vietnam and co-founder of the Mekong Environment Forum, where he creates meetings, exchanges and publications to promote sustainability from bottom-up and citizen science approaches. He has specialised in geopolitics (Southeast Asia), environmental politics (Lower Mekong Subregion), and Vietnamese domestic politics for more than a decade. He has published articles in, among others, International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management, Cogent Social Sciences, Asian Perspective, Nature Conservation, International Journal of China Studies, Journal of Greater Mekong Studies, and DAV International Studies. His latest co-edited book is The Political Economy of Education Reforms in Vietnam (Routledge 2022, with James Albright). Besides academic publication, Quang is the author of numerous invited commentaries and Op-Eds in The Diplomat and East Asia Forum. A scholar-practitioner, he has been engaged in a wide range of research projects, both at the university and through the NGO that he is leading. In the latter capacity, Quang has been responsible for a substantial number of contract research projects focused on climate and agrarian change, climate adaptation, and environmental politics implemented for a range of provincial and international donor agencies. He has delivered a number of guest lectures at foreign universities, including the University of Colorado (2023, USA), the University of South Florida (2023, USA), and Pingtung National University (2022, Taiwan), and has been invited as guest speaker to regional and international conferences, including the The COP28 UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
